Barefoot in the Grasslands
by mattmetzger
Summary: AU. The world has been darker since Vulcan was destroyed; they must forge their own lives in the constant shadow of the Romulan war. And they must do it alone. "The black kid and the alien. What could go wrong?"
1. Chapter 1

**Notes: The tense changing is quite deliberate.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek 2009, and I make no profit from this work.**

* * *

_Barefoot in the Grasslands_

She remembers their first meeting. A sticky summer; she'd been nearly nine (it was always nearly back then) and she'd heard the car pulling up outside. She'd been hiding in the roof again; nobody knew her hidey-hole up there, right in the rafters, under the tiles where the sunlight would creak through and splay patterns on the floor. She'd peeked out through the cracks, seen the silver car peeling up the dusty drive, and she'd known. _New kid_.

New kids always came in silver cars. Old kids went away in black ones.

They always came in the middle of the day. The place'd be quiet then – the older kids, in the summer, snuck off down the creek or into town; the younger kids would get taken off to the end of the garden by Kelly or Darren and they'd play games.

She'd dropped down from her hidey-hole and gone to watch this new kid. New kids were either good news or bad news. New targets were good news when you were only nearly nine. And for a little bit, new bullies would be too because all the bullies would focus around them and you'd be left alone, but eventually someone'd win and you'd become a target again.

When you were the black kid, you were _always _the target.

She remembers she'd been barefoot. She doesn't know why she remembers that bit, but she does. She'd been in her threadbare denim shorts and that big red shirt she'd loved, and she'd been _silent _on the stairs. Nobody coulda heard her, not even Amy Fellon with the bat ears. She'd snuck right down and gone slipping through the office like those ninjas on the telly, and she'd slithered around Kelly's door like a...like a...like another ninja.

And Kelly hadn't noticed, and the man in the boring blue suit hadn't noticed, but the new kid had noticed.

She remembers thinking he really _did_ have bat ears.

She doesn't remember much else.

* * *

Windfield – that home, where they met – wasn't the worst. It wasn't the best, either, but it wasn't the worst. It was this big old house, with all these shadows and hiding places. In the winter, the roof seemed to shiver. In the summer, the grasses spread for miles and rasped to themselves, fat with crickets. She once said, "I've never been to Africa, but I bet it sounds like this." He'd said, "Vulcan had no grasslands." She'd thought that was sad. She still does.

* * *

The new kid was an alien. He had bat ears and big frowny eyebrows and he wore three jumpers even in the summer. He didn't say anything either, and he had to take these big fat yellow pills every morning, and Tall Johnny said they were to stop him reading their brains because he was an alien. But that was stupid, because brains weren't books; you couldn't _read_ them.

She didn't speak to him for a whole month. He didn't speak to her either; he didn't speak to anybody. He didn't come out of his room unless Kelly made him, and when he did, he avoided them all. He bled green, not red like normal people; she noticed when he'd sit in the corner of the room, scratching at his own fingers. He always scratched – _scritscritscritscrit_.

Aliens were crazies, Tall Johnny said.

Some kids – some kids, nobody picked on. Nobody picked on the crazies, because crazies would do things. And the way the new kid would sit and stare and scratch – he was a crazy. And he bled green, and then Kelly would sigh and take him back to his room.

Now, she remembers thinking she could hear him scratching through the walls.

* * *

They'd run out into the grasslands once, when she was nearly ten. They'd held hands, though it hadn't meant anything back then but _keep up, keep up_. They ran until they couldn't hear the littlies in the garden, and then they'd fallen into the earth and listened to the crickets rasping. She'd been too hot, and she'd taken off her favourite red shirt. She'd had the very first puckers of breasts, and she hadn't liked them yet. He'd said, "It's cold." She'd hugged him for the first time, and offered him her red shirt.

* * *

He'd been there a whole month and a half before he said a word, and she never worked out why he did it – not then, not since, and not now. Maybe she'll never know, but he did it. When Tall Johnny tripped her up on the front porch and sent her sprawling down the steps, and said, "What you got money for? Niggers don't get money!" and stole it, and she'd seen him – her ninja-senses, she says so even now – just unfold from the bench where Kelly'd left him that morning.

"Give it back," he'd said, all raspy like he wasn't used to it.

"And what are you gonna do, greenstick?" Tall Johnny'd jeered. "You gonna scratch me like a fuckin' girl?"

"I'll make you give it back. And I'll make you apologise."

Tall Johnny'd just laughed at him. She'd seen it coming; she'd moved outta the way by the time the crazy's boot smashed into the side of Tall Johnny's face and sent him sprawling off the porch and into the dust, all bloody and spitting.

"You fuckin' little...!" he began, but then the crazy kicked him in the ribs, all vicious like, and he choked over and puked in the dirt like a baby and she'd snatched up her credits before he could get his sick all over them.

"C'mon!" she'd snapped, and she'd grabbed his hand and held tight even though he'd jumped like she'd shot him, and then they ran. Ran right out into the dustlands out front of the old house, out where the cars kicked up the dust off the roads, until she plunged them through her favourite hedge and down to the little creek that all the bigger kids ignored.

She dropped there, bare feet in the water, and she'd laughed, all ex-exhi – all happy, and she grinned up at him. After a bit, she tugged at his pants until he sat too, all cross-legged and stiff and scratching at his wrists again, and she said, "I'm Uhura."

He blinked.

"S'my last name. Nobody gets to use my first name."

"Why?"

She doesn't remember being asked why before then. She's tried, but she can't. She's certain he's the first one, though she can't say how she was nearly nine before anybody asked. But then, kids in care don't – didn't – ask too many questions.

"'Cause they don't," she'd said. "It's _my _name. What's yours?"

He scratched a groove and said, "Spock."

It was a crazy name. For a crazy. "Tall Johnny's gonna beat you up."

Spock shook his head.

"You're an alien," she'd said.

"You're black," he'd replied.

They didn't go back until dusk; aliens could see real good in the dark.

* * *

Those were the best days, in a way. Sitting there with him, her feet in the water. Half the time, they'd just ignored each other. She'd dozed in the sunlight; sometimes, he brought his strange books, and sometimes he'd just sit there and scratch and the water'd go a bit green sometimes. "Why do you do that?" she'd asked once. "It hurts," he'd said, but that didn't make any sense. It does now, but she'd just been a kid then.

* * *

Spock got put in the darkroom for what he did to Tall Johnny. She'd never been put there herself – ninjas didn't get caught! – but they all knew it. She still remembers the fear of it; the littlies would cry at just the threat, and all the bigger kids acted tough but they hated it too.

It was this lone bedroom at the end of the east corridor, without any windows and the door only locked from the outside. It had no light. Kelly'd lock you in there for the night; it was lonely, and all you'd ever hear was your own breathing. It was so dark everything pressed in on your eyeballs, and Amy Fellon swore there were spiders big as your hands that would lay eggs in your ears if you went to sleep in there.

Spock liked it. He said it was peaceful. He didn't even scratch.

Crazy.

* * *

Sometimes, she walks barefoot in the fountain, or opens all the windows in the apartment and makes him sit with her, their feet side-by-side in the bath. But it doesn't feel right, and one day – one day – she'll have enough credits to go to Africa, and they'll find an oasis in the grasslands, and it'll be just like then. Only better.

* * *

She turned nine, and Kelly threw her a party with a proper cake and everything. Kelly was always nice on people's birthdays; she'd always make sure you got a real present that was just for _you_, and you'd actually get a slice of your cake, and you'd get first turn in the bathroom before bedtime. And anyway, Uhura _liked _her birthday. Her birthday was a real birthday. Nobody made up her birthday just so she could have one; she had a _real _birthday. And her very first birthday – when she was born – would have been with her parents, and maybe her grandparents, and maybe she'd had brothers and sisters once, and maybe they'd had a dog. She thought they'd be dog people. Any good Mom and Dad would let her have a dog.

(Ironic, now, that she hates dogs.)

Spock didn't come to her birthday party. He'd scratched a big hole in his arm in the night, and Darren had taken him off to the doctor and then to the counsellor, and then he'd come home and shut himself up in his room and wouldn't come down, even when Kelly knocked on his door and offered him cake. (Crazy-crazy, to avoid free cake.)

But in the middle of the night, she remembered the ghost of him in her room, and she'd woken up in the morning to a handmade bracelet from leather strips and cotton, all woven in bright red and pretty orange and burnt yellow, tied around her bedpost.

He never admitted it, but she knew, even then.

She still wears it now.

* * *

The stitches left this big scar on his right arm. You can't see it anymore, but when he shivers in the winter, she can feel it through his jumpers. It's all uneven, and she kisses it sometimes, and he looks at her like he can't remember who she is, or who he is, or why he has a scar to kiss at all. Always, she wishes that she could just kiss it away.

* * *

Winter came, that first winter with him, and they'd tuck themselves up in her attic hidey-hole under the snow, with the blankets from her bed, and they'd spy on the world through the slate tiles and he'd shiver against her and if she tucked his hands under her armpit, he couldn't scratch. She'd tell him secrets about the other kids, and if they stayed up until after dark, he'd show her where Vulcan used to be.

School was lonely. Spock was a whole twelve years old, and she wasn't even nearly ten yet, and anyway she didn't have many friends at school. Nobody liked the care kids, and they'd giggle about her behind her hands and ask her what Africa was like and if she could speak American. But he'd be on the bus home, and she'd sit next to him and try to read his big Vulcan books over his shoulder. Eventually, he began to point out the individual letters – whorls and swirls and twists of ink – and she learned to read Standardised Vulcan (East) in the cold winter sunlight through grimy bus windows.

Somewhere before the spring, he started to say he was thirteen, but he never had a birthday. In January, when the first snow came, she stole out of Kelly's tin in her office and snuck off to buy him some gloves, red like her bracelet.

"One day," she started to say, when she'd sneak out of her room and into his in the night, to curl up under the blankets with him and practise her reading. "One day, we're gonna go to Africa. It's warm in Africa."

* * *

She remembers that winter and the feeling like it would never end, like this would be the rest of their lives, freezing to death together in Spock's narrow bed and trying to read Vulcan by torchlight. Every year, she feels the same; every year, she remembers the other feeling, that it wouldn't be so bad.

* * *

She was nearly ten when Kelly took her to buy her first bra, and told her about periods (like she didn't already know from the older girls) and that she was going to be a young lady soon. She didn't feel like a young lady, but Kelly was real adamant about it.

"And you need to stop sneaking into Spock's room," she said. "You're a young girl, and he's a growing young man, and...well. You'll be adults soon. You're not kids anymore."

"Spock's not a man, he's an alien," she'd said.

"Nyota!"

"_Uhura_."

Kelly's mouth had done that weird frowny thing, and she'd shaken her a bit by the shoulders, and said: "Don't ever say that again."

"But you are," Uhura'd said, when they got home and she and Spock went and hid in his room and barricaded the door and she'd shown him her new bra and the vaguest, slightest bumps of breasts beginning to form. She hadn't _wanted_ any breasts! "You are an alien."

"I'm Vulcan," he'd said.

"Alien."

"Human is alien to me," he'd replied, and she'd put her shirt back on.

"Huh. Can I read more?"

* * *

She remembers, in a very detached way, being young enough that showing someone her breasts meant nothing, when it was as unimportant as showing someone your face or your wrists or the nails on your toes. She remembers going to Spock's bed and not noticing where her breasts pressed into his arm or his chest. She thinks she can remember Spock being young to touch them sometimes, but she isn't quite sure of that.

* * *

Just after she was ten, Jacob and Mary Miller came to Windfield. They were all big toothy smiles and he smelled of wood and grass in the spring, and she smelled of baking and flowers, and she'd patted Uhura's braids and said, "Oh aren't you a pretty thing?" She said 'thing' more like '_thang_.'

Uhura hadn't been anywhere but kids' homes since she was four and the Mwases decided they didn't want her anymore, but the Millers just beamed at her bare feet and her braids and then a week later, Kelly was filling out forms and packing Uhura's bag.

"But," she'd said, pulling on Mary's skirt. "Spock can come visit, right?"

"Of course he can, sugar," and she ducked out of the next pat on the hair to go and find him.

He was in her hiding place in the attic, just _sitting_. He'd started doing that a lot, and he didn't move when she crunched in next to him and squeezed up tight.

"Mary says you can come and visit," she said. "You can come over after school."

He didn't say anything, and she tried to cuddle up proper. He still wasn't all that receptive to hugs. (She knows now that she's never going to change that one.)

"We'll still be us," she promised. "You'll see."

He said nothing, and when Uhura finally went down again to get packed into the back of a bright red car (an old-fashioned one, not a hovercar, but she didn't like hovercars anyway) he didn't come down.

* * *

He never tells her what happened in those months. She's asked and pushed and poked over the years, but he never tells her. She can do enough math to work it out for herself – the way nobody ever bullied him again at Windfield after, the way he'd walk into a room and empty it, the way those thick lines of scarred tissue at his wrists spread right up to his elbows, the way when he got into that fight with that city idiot years later, he knew exactly what to do with his fists...

She knows, but he won't tell her.

* * *

She stayed with the Millers a whole eight months. She had to move schools, and there were more black kids at her new school, and Mary signed her up for ballet lessons which had been her dream forever, and Jacob would sing in Arabic when he was working in the garage so she started to learn a whole new language. She got her very own bedroom, with a double bed and pillows as thick as the mattress, and she could go downstairs for a glass of milk whenever she wanted.

There were the bad things too. Mary didn't like her walking around barefoot – "Honey, you gotta wear shoes outside and slippers inside, those are the rules!" – and they both used her first name when they weren't allowed, and they kept trying to persuade her to give up Uhura.

"You got a new family now, kiddo," Jacob said, and Uhura'd scowled and pulled away.

"It's my _Dad's _name," she said. She couldn't remember Dad, but she had a picture of him and Mom, and they were _her _Mom and Dad. She _had _some. She didn't need new ones. "It's _my _name."

They didn't like that, but she never got locked in her room, so she didn't care.

She didn't like her new school, though. The other kids all expected her to hang around with the black kids, and she didn't like any of them. They spoke funny and they listened to all the wrong music and they'd pull her braids and tell her to cut them short. The brown kids and the white kids did the same: hung around in colour-cliques and refused to cross boundaries, and the odd time she tried to talk to the only alien in her grade, she'd be regarded with suspicion and told to go away. At least in her old school, the care kids had hung out together even if they didn't like each other very much ordinarily. Here, there was nobody – nobody she even knew, never mind anyone to keep her company in class and at lunch break.

Still...

Still it was worth it, she figured. She didn't have to share her things, or protect them from marauding bullies in the house. Mary Miller's cooking was _way _better than Darren's at Windfield, and she could have seconds any time she liked. And ballet was – well. She used to think _everyone _should have ballet lessons.

On Fridays, Mary would pick her up from school and take her all the way over to her old school to pick up Spock too. Uhura knew, even back then, that Mary didn't really like Spock, but she hadn't cared, too happy to be able to pull him into the back seat with her and stutter out the broken Vulcan greetings he'd taught her in the night in Windfield. He was unfailingly polite to her foster parents, but she'd always drag him off upstairs the moment they got home. The Millers didn't have an attic, but her bedroom had this big walk-in closet and she'd cleared a space in the corner for their new hiding place. They were getting too big for it, really, but they crushed up close and would whisper to each other like they were little kids again.

Sometimes he'd just stay until Saturday, and sometimes the whole weekend. Mary would always make up the spare room, but Uhura would extract him again some time in the night after the Millers went to bed, and they'd curl up in the middle of her double bed and whisper in Vulcan. Spock always sounded so much fiercer in his own language, so much more _alive_. Sometimes, she wondered if she'd sound more alive in her parents' language, but back then she didn't even know which one they'd spoken. Sometimes she wished she could remember everything, like Spock, but sometimes she didn't. Maybe it hurt more, to really remember dead people. At least she couldn't remember losing her Mom and Dad; even then, she thought Spock could.

Mary didn't like it. Jacob probably hadn't liked it either, but he never really said much. But Mary didn't like it – she'd get this pinched expression whenever Uhura talked about Spock, and she'd try to insist that they slept in separate beds, and she started planning things for the 'family' to do on weekends that Spock couldn't come to. Uhura had _hated _that. That had been the first fight, and she'd run off to the park by herself, barefoot and alone, like she was back in the home.

Seven and a half months after she left Windfield, she overheard Mary's, "If we just keep her busy, she'll forget all about that Vulcan boy. She likes her ballet classes; maybe we should sign her up for singing lessons. She's got a good voice."

Uhura had snuck away, packed a bag, and slipped out. It was the first time she'd run away, and she only stayed out until nine in the evening, when a police car with a blonde policewoman with a nice smile picked her up. But she kept it up, every night, on and on and on and on and on and on and on...

The Millers returned her to Windfield ready for the spring. She had dropped her bag back in her old room, crept up to the attic, and squeezed in beside Spock.

"I'm home," she said.

It was the last time she'd get fostered.

* * *

At the time, it wasn't a divider, but she remembers it that way now. That was the moment they stopped being kids playing at friendship, and began to grow up. That was the first time she held his hand and thought _home_.

They hadn't quite been kids anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes: The tense changing is quite deliberate.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek 2009, and I make no profit from this work.**

* * *

Windfield didn't keep kids forever. They only kept the little kids; when you turned fourteen, you'd be shunted off to Leopold House, across the town. Spock waited it out longer than most, because nobody knew when his Terran birthday should have been, and then one day Kelly worked it out and they took him away in the big black car.

Uhura didn't mind too much. She was a grand old eleven before they took him away, old enough to skip school and go down to the creek with him and ignore the world. They played truant more than either of them attended school; Spock got his alien hands on more Vulcan books somehow, and they'd read out under the sun. When it got cold, they'd sneak back into Windfield and hide in the attic. They barely fit anymore; she had to sit in his lap and listen to him breathe as they practised.

They never got caught. She got shouted at plenty for skipping, but the world didn't care about diplomas anymore. Vulcan was gone; the idyll that her Mom and Dad probably knew had long since gone. There was always work for people who could turn a screw and make weapons. Even then, Uhura knew you couldn't fight Klingons and Romulans with _talking_.

So the years passed, and then the car was coming for Uhura too, and she had a new room – a narrow, chilly little thing – in a new building, that she didn't have to share with anybody, and a bathroom door that locked properly. She discovered privacy, and fantasy, and masturbation, and Spock was once more just down the hall, and in her head when she touched herself for the first time.

Because...

Something had changed. He had these wide shoulders and narrow hips and a gravity to his face; he looked stern and fierce and when he clenched his fists, she could _see _him smashing Tall Johnny in the head again, only this time doing a lot more damage. His eyebrows were deep grooves under overgrown hair, and his ears were no longer pinched, but tightened into a sharp point. And when she touched them, just the once, he jerked away and flushed.

Somewhere – she didn't quite know where, but somewhere – he'd become a man. He was nearly seventeen years old, and he'd quite suddenly become a man. In the testosterone stench of Leopold House, with the feuding boys and the sharp-tongued girls that the system had abandoned, his wild danger was suddenly obvious.

She doesn't remember when she stopped thinking of him as her best friend; she does remember the first time she really _looked_ at him.

* * *

Spock has been _hers _so long that she forgets, sometimes, what other people see. She forgets that he's alien, and she forgets that he was born on a world that no longer exists, and she forgets that his brain was wired differently to hers and that over years of a human upbringing, and a messy one at that, the wires have gotten tangled.

She remembers again sometimes, when he crushes a door handle in a fit of rage, or quite literally tears off her dress like it's made of tissue paper, but she doesn't mind. He's fierce and furious, but he's never out of control. Not with her. She _keeps _him under control, and when he loses that and becomes that primal, snarling _animal_...she isn't afraid.

She's never been afraid of him. Maybe that's what everyone missed all along.

* * *

Spock put his fist through a wall at Leopold House, when Andy Snow tried to put his hand up her skirt, and they sent him to a counsellor. He hated the counsellor; he would return on those Tuesday afternoons raging, and she would grip his hands and say, "He's an idiot," and, "Calm down." If she held his hands, he calmed down. If she didn't, he would rage and destroy things and one time one of the care workers, David, came into the room to stop him and ended up with a fractured cheekbone.

"He's dangerous," the other kids whispered. "He's going to kill someone."

He wasn't the first kid to lash out; they left him alone. And the boys left Uhura alone, and she held his hands when he raged, and everything was fine.

* * *

She wonders what Spock would be like if he'd been raised Vulcan. Would she like him? More to the point, would he like her?

* * *

They started to change his medication. The yellow pills became orange capsules twice a day, and – Uhura hated them. She _hated _them. When Spock took those, his eyes would glaze over and he'd be still and quiet and _calm_, but not good calm, like when she held his hands. _Absent _calm, like he wasn't even there, like he was disappearing and just didn't care.

"You have to stop taking them," she told him once.

"I can't," he said numbly. "It's only quiet when I take them."

Uhura liked language and voices and speech. She didn't like quiet.

* * *

She wakes in the night sometimes, and he's in her head, quiet and asleep. But it's not the same kind of quiet. He sleeps in the back of her mind, where she keeps pictures of Africa, buried in the sand dunes and the scrublands. He's warm and heavy and she's only human and can't do it, but if she could hug him with her mind, she would. She sleeps – and wakes – best when he's inside.

* * *

She stole books from the school library – fat, ancient textbooks from when knowing anything about Vulcans was important – and devoured them, absorbing anything and everything she could find. The history, the politics, the planet itself and the people on it, culture and art and science and language and even pictures, hundreds of pictures of a stern-faced, dark-eyed people with arching eyebrows and pointed ears and long, long fingers, just like him.

And they were telepaths, the books said. They could touch people and read their minds – but sometimes they didn't need to touch, and they didn't have any emotions, and they were all logical and meditated everywhere and had these principles from some ancient prophet (or something like that) called Surak.

Spock had that book; she had learned to read from it. The Vulcan Bible.

She'd taken him the book, and told him to try the meditating stuff, and stop taking the orange pills. He had looked at her and said, "If I don't, I can hear everything."

"People's thoughts?"

"Yes."

"So tell me their secrets."

She'd held his hands; he'd folded up small on the floor of her room and gone still and quiet, and she'd thought about the grasslands. He had smiled, for the very first time, and the scratches up his arms began to heal.

* * *

She has words for it now, what she is to him when he folds up in the corners of the world and stills for a while. It hasn't changed much; in her, he finds that calm that makes him suddenly _Vulcan_ as opposed to a merely volatile man. Sometimes he can do it alone; sometimes not. She doesn't mind; he is as natural to her as breathing by now.

* * *

He began to calm a little after that, though he was still volatile in the hour or so before his next pill. She still hated them – with a passion, hated them – but she kept quiet in exchange for being allowed to hold his hand when he shied away from everyone else, refusing to touch or be touched.

She turned fifteen. Leopold House didn't do birthdays; they weren't kids naive enough to think they'd ever find homes anymore. But Spock did her birthday: they went to the creek in the grasslands that they hadn't visited since they were children, and he gave her a cheap stone on a black string. The stone glittered deep red; it was cool against her chest when she looped the string on over her head.

They stayed out until the stars began to blink, and the bright haze of a shuttle cruising in the upper atmosphere streamed across the sky. He looked exotic in the grass and the dull moonlight, and she held his hand and dreamed of more.

* * *

She thinks, now, that she wants to see the African grasslands not because of some vague identity of that having been – or that it should have been – home, but to see Spock under that sky, too.

* * *

She had always envied the pretty girls. She was a plain child, always passed over when people came to Windfield; the Millers were the only ones who'd ever commented. But she was fifteen, and not a little girl anymore - as much as Spock was changing, she was as well. Her cheekbones had made themselves known, and her eyes had followed them; her hair had slowly lost its curls over the years, her legs had taken over from the rest of her body, and her hips mirrored her small, pert breasts.

Somewhere along the line, she had become pretty.

When Spock looked at her, she felt beautiful, and wondered if her breasts would not fit perfectly into his long-fingered hands.

* * *

She can say now that they do.

* * *

She was fifteen years old and eighteen days when Spock smashed the doorframe to the study room. She can't remember what set him off – probably Andy Snow again – but she remembers seizing his arm and dragging him outside into the sunlight. They ran, before anyone could catch up, and disappeared through the hedges to the emptiness north of the town. It wasn't the grasslands, but it was lonely and bare and they hunkered down a mile from Leopold House against lonely, rotting fenceposts, breathless and – her, anyway – feeling a little like runaway children.

She had laughed, and said something like, "You're going to have your allowance cut again," and his hands had suddenly been cool on her shoulders and he'd kissed her, sharp and surprising and just that little bit strange. She had stared at him, bitten her lip, and kissed him back. His hands, when they slid up under her shirt and lightly touched her bra, had none of their youthful innocence. Hers, when she undid it, were certain.

That was their first kiss, their first fumbling beginning, the first time she thought of him and _knew _the ideas that were taking shape. It was not the last.

She lost her virginity three days later, to him, in the darkness of the early morning in her room. It had hurt a little, and he had murmured in Vulcan to her, and his hand was a pale splash of colour against her breast. She had held it there through the night, feeling a pulse fast as a hummingbird in the wrist, and nowhere near as delicate.

She still remembers what it is to be a girl in love.

* * *

She is still in love.

* * *

It was easy. Perhaps it always had been. She still snuck into his room in the dead of night, but they no longer slept much. Sometimes they walked the six miles back from school together; if she kissed him, there would be a moment when she could have sworn she felt him reach for her even if he didn't physically move.

She felt powerful, with him. She felt as though if she only held on, she controlled not just him, but the world. She controlled the both of them, and the universe around them. If she wanted to drive away the Romulan threat, then she could. If she wanted to fix things, then she could. If she wanted to fix _him_...

"Stop taking the pills," she whispered in the dark once, and he paused.

"Uhura..."

"Nyota," she corrected, for the first time. "Stop taking them. Be _you_. You're alright when you're with me."

He started flushing the pills the next morning. She still does not regret it.

* * *

_"...made a formal declaration of war with the Romulan Star Empire at six o'clock this morning after the latest in a series of attacks against Tellarite ships along the borders of the Neutral Zone. Upon receiving news of the declaration, the Andorian Empire also declared war, meaning that all former Federation members, with the obvious exception of Vulcan, have declared themselves at odds with the Romulans. The decision of the Andorians to join a conflict sparked by the destruction of Vulcan is one that..."_

She still remembers every word.

* * *

Spock was nearly eighteen when war was declared, and in times of conflict or open war, everybody knew what happened to the unwanted kids, ever since Vulcan and the collapse of the Federation.

They were recruited.

When Vulcan had been destroyed, it had taken the Federation with it. But the destroyer, Emperor Nero, had returned to Romulus and bolstered the Empire's power, and the former Federation members had never been allowed to sit back and count their losses. Starfleet was a shattered shadow of its former self, staffed with the useless and the unwanted, the kids churned out by prisons and juvenile courts and care homes with nowhere else to go but space, to the deaths that awaited.

"You can't go," she told him that night.

"I can't stay," he replied.

"Run," she said. "You'll find work, easily. The ammunitions factories and the shipyards always want strong people. You won't need your bioID."

"They will resort to conscription."

"Not for a while. If you find work in the shipyards, then they won't conscript you at all," she insisted.

His fingers curled at her back. "The Vulcan way is one of accepting one's responsibilities..."

"You're not Vulcan," she said. "You're Human."

She felt that odd burst of warmth in the back of her mind when they lay close. "Like you."

"Like me," she agreed. "You have to go."

"Then you have to come with me."

"What?" she still remembers that cold jar of shock down her back, and the way the warm feeling popped.

"They will not stop at the men. They will take everyone; war with the Romulans will be long," he spoke slowly, as if in memory. "They may even drop the age of conscription. If they do not recruit you now, then they will before it's over. If I am going, then you are as well."

She doesn't quite remember saying yes; she does remember, before the dawn broke, slipping from Leopold House hand-in-hand, with stolen credits and a single bag each. She remembers picking a destination off the list at the domestic terminal at random, stabbing her finger into a map and making Spock read the name before opening her eyes.

She remembers being fifteen, in sneakers on concrete, and feeling simultaneously absolutely trapped, and absolutely free.

* * *

She still has her citizenship card stolen from the office at Leopold House. Her bioID was burned somewhere along the line. Her citizenship card is green and faded, the chip for the iris scan almost completely worn away. Spock's is a dual card, striped green and white. There is no chip; Vulcan privacy, long since rendered useless, meant he'd never had an iris scan at all.

* * *

Domestic shuttles were cheap, nasty hoverbuses with souped-up engines back then. The government had had better places to shuffle the money. They crushed together in a pair of narrow seats, and an old man clucked and said, "Been called up? Headin' to the bases?"

"Yes," she'd said.

"Kinda young, aintcha?" he squinted at her.

"They aren't being picky," she said tartly, and the old guy left it. Spock curled his hand around her waist and dropped his head back. He hadn't cut his hair in weeks; the points of his ears were completely hidden. They were headed north; she wondered if he had warm enough clothes for this.

When they stopped at the first station to recharge the shuttle batteries, she slipped out to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She remembers thinking, _What are you doing? You're only fifteen. They won't come for you yet! _

She doesn't remember ever answering herself.

* * *

Spock got rid of their bioIDs, and the tracer chips inside them, on that first shuttle journey. At the time, she didn't think to ask what he'd done with them. Now, she daren't. Vulcans are a lot trickier and a lot more cunning than Spock ever led her to believe back then, and apparently it's nature, not nurture.

* * *

Looking back, she was still a child. Running away in sneakers and jeans with her hair still in those beaded braids she'd loved in her teenage years, and two hundred credits in her pocket like it would ever last outside of a small town, hand-in-hand with a Vulcan she still referred to as 'my boyfriend' in her head with the silly, childish love hearts and everything. She'd been a kid. She didn't know anything of the real world.

That first night away from Leopold House, shivering in a chilly Detroit homeless shelter and trying to wrap around Spock's tense, sleepless shoulders as much as she could, she began to be an adult.


End file.
